HMS Agamemnon: The Battleship That Hosted an Armistice and Then Became a Target

Built in the Shadow of a Revolution

HMS Agamemnon had the misfortune of being designed at the exact wrong moment in battleship history. She was one of two Lord Nelson-class pre-dreadnought battleships, the last of that older type the Royal Navy ever built, and construction was well under way when HMS Dreadnought came along in 1906 and rendered the entire pre-dreadnought concept obsolete almost overnight. To add insult to injury, some of Agamemnon's own 12-inch guns were actually diverted to speed up Dreadnought's completion, delaying Agamemnon's own finish by months amid labour troubles at her builder, William Beardmore and Company's Dalmuir yard, where she had the distinction of being the very first warship built. Laid down on 15 May 1905 and launched on 23 June 1906, she was not finally commissioned until 25 June 1908, arriving into service as, in effect, yesterday's design.

A Quiet Start

Her early peacetime years were unremarkable, serving with the Home Fleet's Nore Division, save for one embarrassing moment in February 1911 when she grazed an uncharted rock in the harbour at Ferrol in Spain and damaged her hull. It was a minor prelude to a war that would treat her rather more roughly.

Into the Dardanelles

When war broke out in 1914, Agamemnon initially covered the transport of the British Expeditionary Force to France and patrolled the Channel, before being sent to the Mediterranean in February 1915 for what became the Dardanelles campaign, one of the war's most costly and controversial operations. She arrived on 19 February and went straight into action against Ottoman coastal forts, and over the following weeks took an extraordinary battering for a single ship. On 25 February she was struck by seven 9.4-inch shells in ten minutes, holed above the waterline. On 7 March, Fort Hamidieh landed eight large-calibre hits on her, including one especially large round, reportedly 14 inches, that wrecked her quarterdeck and wardroom. On 18 March she was hit twelve times in 25 minutes by a howitzer battery. By any reasonable measure, Agamemnon absorbed as much punishment in a few weeks off the Dardanelles as most battleships saw in their entire careers, and kept fighting throughout.

She went on to support the main Allied landings from late April, protecting minesweeping operations, and as late as December 1915 was still bombarding targets ashore, joining HMS Endymion and the small monitor HMS M33 in an attack on the Kavak bridge.

A Zeppelin, and an Armistice

With the Dardanelles campaign wound up by January 1916, Agamemnon settled into duty with the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, later renamed the Aegean Squadron, based at Mudros and tasked with protecting Allied-held islands, supporting the Salonika front, and watching for any attempt by the German battlecruiser Goeben to break out into the wider Mediterranean. In one particularly satisfying episode on 5 May 1916, her gunners used 12-pounder fire to damage the German Zeppelin LZ-85 over Salonika badly enough to force it down, a rare battleship-versus-airship engagement.

Her most historically significant moment, however, involved no shooting at all. On 30 October 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros aboard Agamemnon while she lay at anchor in Lemnos, formally ending the war in the Middle Eastern theatre. It is a striking thing for a ship that had spent 1915 being pounded by Ottoman shore batteries to end up, three years later, playing host to the very armistice that took the Ottoman Empire out of the war altogether.

Reinvented as a Target

Agamemnon returned home and was paid off into reserve in March 1919, and by rights her story should have ended there, in a quiet scrapping like so many other obsolete pre-dreadnoughts. Instead, she was chosen, ahead of her old rival HMS Hibernia, for a genuinely novel second career: becoming the Royal Navy's first radio-controlled target ship, a project championed by Admiral David Beatty to give gunnery crews realistic practice against a full-sized, manoeuvring battleship rather than a static hulk.

Stripped of most of her armament and equipment but keeping her distinctive 12-inch turrets for visual realism, she was rewired for radio control at Chatham between December 1920 and April 1921, retaining a skeleton crew of 153 for trials work. What followed was an unusual and slightly grim sequence of experiments: exposure to poison gas trials in March 1921, strafing by aircraft machine guns that September, and years of being deliberately shelled with 6-inch, 5.5-inch and 4.7-inch rounds by the battlecruisers HMS Renown and HMS Repulse, all in the name of working out exactly how much punishment a modern warship could take.

The Last of Her Kind

Agamemnon carried on in this role until December 1926, when she was finally relieved as target ship by the more modern dreadnought HMS Centurion. By this point she held a genuine historical distinction: she was the last British pre-dreadnought battleship still in existence, the final survivor of an entire generation of warship rendered obsolete the moment she was launched. She was sold to shipbreakers J. Cashmore of Newport on 24 January 1927 and left Portsmouth on 1 March 1927 to be broken up, closing out a career that had somehow managed to be outdated from birth, battered nearly beyond recognition at the Dardanelles, host to an armistice, and finally, deliberately, used as target practice, all in less than twenty years.